The present specification generally relates to systems, methods, and industrial vehicles for determining the visibility of features and, more specifically, to systems, methods, and industrial vehicles for utilizing visible features and excluding occluded features to navigate industrial vehicles.
Industrial vehicles, including for example, forklift trucks, hand and motor driven pallet trucks, and/or other materials handling vehicles, can be utilized in order to move items about an industrial environment. The industrial vehicles can be configured as an automated guided vehicle or a manually guided vehicle that navigates through the environment. In order to facilitate automated guidance, navigation, or both, the industrial vehicle may be adapted for localization within the environment such as, for example, pose and position of the industrial vehicle. Accordingly, the industrial vehicle can be adapted with sensors configured to detect features in the environment and processors for determining the location of the industrial vehicle using the detected features. However, the features can be occluded by objects that prevent the features from being detected by the sensor. The failure to detect the occluded features can cause the localization to fail, produce inaccurate results, and require increased processing time.
Accordingly, a need exists for alternative systems, methods, and industrial vehicles for determining the visibility of features.